Take a scientific guess

This article was taken from the June 2011 issue of Wired
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Science deals in certainties, right? Wrong, says Montreal-based
mathematician William Byers. In his book The Blind Spot
(Princeton University Press), he contends that this view is wide of
the mark and dangerous, influenced by the human need for everything
to be "certain".

So when it comes to blind spots in science, we make a reasonable
guess about what is there -- think of how our brains fill in the
hole of the visual blind spot -- and this isn't necessarily a bad
thing. "When we consider a blind spot, it sounds negative. But that
depends on your point of view," says Byers. "Uncertainty and
incompleteness are precisely the places we need to look for
creative breakthroughs." Here Byers describes four infamous blind
spots -- and how we saw around them.

THEN:

◗ CANTOR AND INFINITY

Georg Cantor challenged notions of infinity (that said it was
impossible to grasp) with his work on different "sizes" of
infinity, over 100 years ago. But he was met with hostility when he
made his views public. "People said he was perverse," says Byers.
"Now his idea of different orders of infinity is just a normal part
of mathematics. It's obvious there were blind spots."

◗ EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY

"People worked for thousands of years before realising they
couldn't prove the parallel postulate [one of the key axioms of
Euclid's geometrical model]," says Byers. "Before that, Euclidean
geometry was the way reality was. Later, there were lots of
different geometries
developed. That was a huge paradigm shift -- to think of geometry
not as reality but as a model."

NOW:

◗ FINANCIAL CRISIS

Besides greedy bankers, another factor in the recent meltdown
was the wrongful thinking that mathematical formulae could make
playing the stock market a predictable, low-risk affair. "There
were people using very heavy-duty maths to model the financial
situation," says Byers. "The blind spot was the belief that the
market could be captured by these differential equations."

◗ CLIMATE CHANGE

Science is being used as a pernicious tool by climate-change deniers, says Byers: "The blind spot is the
search for absolute proof. Pinning down to the last decimal point
that global warming is caused by greenhouse gasses -- those people
are consciously using a false view of science." Byers says that if
there is a strong likelihood that global
warming exists and is a result of human activity, we must
act.